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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Early 19th-century Cherokee and Moravian Spirituality Converges at Springplace, Georgia
by Rowena McClinton
The Gambold Springplace Diary, located at the Moravian Archives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is a handwritten manuscript recorded in an archaic writing convention called German script. Working with the diary involves entering two worlds that were as different from each other as they are from 21st-century America. The Moravian Church, or the Unity of the Brethren, predated the Protestant Reformation and had a history of persecution for its stances on nonviolence and objections to the machinery of church and state. The other world, that of the Cherokees, emerged from centuries-old Mississippian tradition that imbued the physical world with spiritual meaning. Their very rocks and streams held life unquenchable by the secular Anglo world that would displace the Cherokees in the 1838-39 forced removal.
The Gambold Diary opens a window to a bygone era where two distinct cultures interacted and reveals divergent spiritual aspects of Moravian and Cherokee convergence on the southern American landscape. Culling ethnographic materials from these eyewitness accounts divulges these interchanges, often unfolding profound misunderstandings and mututal perplexity. Divergent beliefs about blood provide a good example.
Springplace, Georgia. Courtesy of the Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth, Pennsylvania.
One Cherokee guest at the Moravian's Springplace mission, The Bird, questioned the missionaries about the mystical properties of blood, thereby setting the stage for mutual doubts about each other's spiritual soundness. The Bird had attended the Passion Liturgy, which Cherokee students interpreted for him. Through his youthful translators, he told the missionaries that he had "already learned a great deal about the birth, life, sufferings, death, resurrection, and ascension of the dear Lord, and he wanted to hear more." Consequently, the Cherokee pupils told him the "Old Testament story of the creation of the world, the first man and his fall, the unhappiness that came to all humans as a result of this, and the necessity of the Redeemer." The Cherokee students at Springplace concluded by emphasizing the "love of God for His poor fallen humans." Pupils explained, "We humans have to prevail on Him alone to have mercy on us, to suffer in our place, to atone for our sins, and to pay with His blood." Following this Bible lesson, "The Bird sat in deep thought." Finally, the old chief asked "if Jesus shed all of His blood." Then he raised the crucial question: "Did His blood fall onto all the earth?"
To the Moravians, blood represented Christ's mystical substance that could pardon sins and make the human heart pure and divine. The Savior's blood alone was powerful enough to atone for the sinfulness of human beings; it erased former and present wrongs. Therefore, a person who exhibited a contrite heart was not ultimately accountable for his or her behavior. The Savior had completed what no earthly being could do: grant mercy and forgiveness for all human beings throughout the world. To the Moravians, His blood provided the means.
The Moravians maintained an uneasy peace within the confines of the Lutheran orthodoxy when they became obsessed with "Blood Theology," a set of beliefs that made them questionable to Lutherans. So in addition to their unpopular stances on nonviolence, the established church, and political participation, Moravians brought to North America distinctive ways of worshipping that already had caused a furor in Europe.
In the 1740s, during the "Sifting Period," their leader, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, cultivated in his followers an obsession with blood that accentuated the very imagery of blood. Members sought to keep Christ's death and suffering on the cross always before them; His wounds and blood signified the total sacrifice God had made for humankind. Members were to feel joy for His oblation by uniting with Christ in a child-like way. This Legensgefeuhl, or joyful feeling for life, appealed to the sensual and emotional nature of the communicants. So, during the time when Europe and British North America experienced the Age of Reason or Enlightenment, Moravians embraced the opposite: antirationalism. Zinzendorf discouraged members from using their own brains, their reason. Communicants did not need reason because they were only children in the arms of Christ, who banished all their cares and doubts. Self-named groups of little fools, little worms, baby chicks, "who could feel at home in the Sidehole and crowl in deep" formed throughout the "sifting" period.
Additionally, Moravian practices pertaining to the wounds of Jesus epitomized extreme and heightened lustful longings for His body. Christian Renatus, the son of Zinzendorf, built a "side wound" on the wal of the church in Herrnhut, Saxony, whereby the congregation experienced the Savior's blood by marching through it. Therefore the Sidehole became symbolic of their wound theology.
In the early 19th century, Moravians had not completely abandoned their obsession with blood and the wounds of Jesus, especially the stab wound in His side. The Gambolds, both descendants from the Bethlehem congregation where "Blood" or "Wound" theology had its most profound effect in British North America, centered their evangelical work among the Cherokees on the shedding of the Savior's blood and why lowly humans could never be grateful enough for His ultimate bloody sacrifice on the cross. Transparent pictures and living tableaus were part of worship services that depicted the mutilations and agonies of Jesus.
The Cherokee view of blood signified a vastly different mindset from the Moravians, a fact that intensified their mutual incomprehension. When the Moravian missionaries arrived in the Cherokee Nation, they encountered a people who valued order and believed things should stay in their place. Cherokees attached special meaning to anomalies because these occurred along the interstices of their categorical system. Substances that belonged inside the body but were expelled received particular attention, and thus blood, breath, and saliva possessed mystical properties that healed or induced death.
For healing purposes, the blowing or spraying of a special prepared concotion over a feverish body by post-menopausal women was common. Since these women no longer possessed hidden forces brought about by their menses, they lacked the powers to harm or cause death. But their long experience with blood had imbued them with extraordinary spiritual power. Therefore, post-menopausal women took care of warriors' wounds and attended to younger women while they secluded themselves during menstruation and following childbirth. Menstrual periods for Cherokees represented a time of exquisite bodily awareness and heightened spiritual power.
Likewise substantial ancestral meanings emanated from menstrual blood. The ancient myth of Stoneclad, the wicked stone-skinned monster, portrays how his advances terrified a Cherokee village. A Cherokee shaman could stop him only when Stoneclad came in contact with the seventh woman whose menstrual cycle had "just begun."
Women's blood also signified creation. Women embodied the very essence of birth, and it was their blood that held the future of the human race. In "Windigo Goes South: Stoneclad among the Cherokees," anthropologist Raymond Fogelson proposes that Stoneclad represented the masculine world in antithesis to the feminine realm.
Historian Gregory Dowd suggests that women, as "keepers of the village, as cultivators, stood in greater opposition to the monster than did men, who operated as hunters in 'nature'." When men shed blood, it meant death; women's bleeding connoted life.
According to Cherokee myth, Selu, the first woman, had given her sons instructions on how to grow corn. Believing her a witch, they killed her and dragged her body around the circle. Wherever her blood spilled, corn grew. They took her around only twice; consequently, Cherokees work her corn twice. Her boys had only cleared seven spots, and that was why corn is grown in just a few places.
Cherokees found little practical value in blood as a means to absolve them of the sins that they did not believe they had committed. Furthermore, most adult Cherokees had little interest in adopting Moravian beliefs or in converting the Moravians to theirs, since they did not accept the notion of the universality of religious belief. Christianity probably seemed so mysterious to many Cherokees that they remained uncertain whether religion and western medicine even applied to them.
When Cherokee visitors entered the Sprincplace Mission, located on the federal road connecting Augusta, Georgia, with Nashville, Tennessee, they received a religious education, whether they wanted one or not. Parents of students and other visitors came often. A Cherokee student, Dawzizi, son the The Tiger and Oodeisaski of Big Spring, near the Springplace Mission, explained to his father, and another Cherokee, The Little Broom, and his wife, who all ate a noonday meal at the mission, about the important and necessary truths of crucifixion. The Tiger, his father, listened thoughtfully, but The Little Broom laughed really loud in an Indian manner, as if it signified something new and strange.
In the missionary houses and on the walls of the mission school were paintings of the crucifixion. These represented not just the death of a person, but the death of God. Again the side hole was the focal point. Perhaps those representations evoked a sense of blasphemy for visiting Cherokees. THe Moravians lamented the fact that the centerpiece of Christianity, the crucifixion, held litle awe for the Cherokees. Some Cherokees politely listened to these stories, but showed little genuine interest. Native American scholar Gregory Dowd noted that Indians probably found the Europeans' treatment of their God rather appalling: "Here were a people who admitted to having killed their God." The Moravians also consumed the body and blood of their God, which to the Cherokees was taboo. The Cherokees placed blood and flesh in opposite categories, and they considered animals that ate flesh to be abominations.
Perhaps as intriguing as the profound differences between Cherokee and Moravian beliefs is the respect both Cherokees and Moravians exhibited for each other. Although the Cherokees had little interest in adopting Moravian Christianity and expressed mostly skepticism about the Moravians' most penetrating beliefs, Moravian missionaries and the community of Salem consistently extended hospitality to Cherokees, treated them with respect, educated their children, and performed any number of services for them.
Similarly, the Cherokees were cognizant of the missionaries' commitment to their fellow human beings, and they looked to the Moravians for ways to adapt peacefully to an ever-changing world that was far more intolerant of diversity than were the Moravians. In a period of hardening racial attitudes, demands for Indian removal, a fraudulent treaty, and ultimately dispossession, a conscientious religious group, the Moravians, applied principles of peace and exemplified human understanding.
According to Moravian historian John Sensbach, "peoples of color" from all over the world have historically reached out to Moravians, and they have helped form the modern Moravian Church. Moravian characteristics of humility and simplicity gave the Gambolds a sense of transnationalism and therefore access to the Cherokee people. As careful observers of Cherokee culture, the missionaries provide an important link to the past, and this edition of the Gambold Diary enhances our understanding of disparate worlds. Simultaneously, it suggests that there was an alternative to the racism and dispossession that characterized the interactions of Cherokees and most Americans of European descent. Dissimilar worlds did indeed meet at Springplace, and individuals challenged each other's most intellectual beliefs, but then human beings sat down together at "our table," unser Tisch, where there was room for all. These diaries perhaps make the Moravian concept of community plausible, not just for the past, but also for the future.
Rowena McClinton is editor/author of "The Moravian Springplace Mission among the Cherokees, 1805-1821," endorsed by the NHPRC. This documentary editing edition, a translation and annotation of the German script diaries of John and Anna Rosina Gambold (1805-1821), will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003.
